Sant’Agata sul Santerno (Ravenna), 16 May 2024 – That day, a year ago, a Sant’Agata sul SanternoRavenna countryside in Lower Romagna, the water had also engulfed the cemetery. No peace for the living, nor for the dead. And yesterday too, at a certain point, there seems to be no mercy: a strong storm hits Lugo, Mordano, Bagnara, Forlì, Villanova. Damage, flooding and the fear that returns.
Saint Agatha herself cries: the sky falls, but this time, on the anniversary of the most disastrous flood, the clouds stop after a while. He lives in one of those houses in one of the most devastated countries Giuliana Bordini. Her husband, Giovanni Sella, was the town barber: he died at 89. Drowned. In his bed. Giuliana is the only survivor: in almost all the houses attacked by the flood, elderly people died in pairs or alone. Many were securing their belongings or animals.
Learn more:
Flood, one year later: watch the extended trailer of our docu-film ‘I saw hell’
“From the window. They took me out of the upstairs window”, says Giuliana. The house is now tidy, the walls very white: they have been repainted and the doors changed: “I put all my life savings into itand now I have nothing left”, he says. In the air the smell of roast chicken skin becoming crispy: it’s life that goes on, inexorable. “But it’s better if I were dead too, like this…” , Giuliana Bordini cries, as she holds the photo of her husband Giovanni close to her heart. And the story is heartbreaking.
Giuliana Bordini shows the photo of Giovanni Sella, who died at the age of 89 in the flood. He was the barber of Sant’Agata sul Santerno
“I saw the end of the world. Giovanni and I were already in bed, he was downstairs, because he wasn’t moving. He was already asleep. I was upstairs. We had just saw inter-Milan, then the bedside lamp light went off”, he says. That light being turned off is a sinister omen: “I say to myself ‘Wait Giuliana, maybe the circuit breaker has blown’. And then I go down.” But once I got halfway up the stairs, “I had water here.” The hand raises and points to my throat: “My feet slipped, I was frozen, as if dead, but I ran away – she says in desperation –. I start to say ‘Giovanni I don’t see you anymore, Giovanni I don’t see you anymore’… He was asleep, I don’t know what death he died”. Silence. And pain: “After five days they came to take him, I had prepared his clothes for the funeral, but they couldn’t touch him because he was already black. Think of the death he caused”, says Giuliana.
She is saved by a miracle. “They tied me with a rope. Made to leave from an upstairs window, the civil protection of Massa Lombarda had come: they put me on my knees on a stretcher, I arrived in Massa I was all wet, with my shirt soaked, all frozen and dirty.”
Giorgio, Giuliana and Giovanni’s son, had died very young a few years ago due to terrible leukemia: “He had had a transplant with a donor from America, it was more precise than a twin brother – he says –. But then there was it was rejection. Giorgio hugged me and my husband and told us “Mom, dad, I was supposed to be the stick of your old age and instead I have to die first”. Giorgio asked Giuliana for a promise before dying: to go on trips. And she and Giuliano, once their son was no longer there, fulfilled that last wish. The photos on the sideboard and in the albums tell of that ‘testament’ and the greatest sacrifice: surviving a child. But for Giuliana it wasn’t over. She saw pandemonium: her husband died overwhelmed by the water, in the house. Killed by the flood. And a year later, in Sant’Agata, she is not finished yet.
Today the film at the Modernissimo in Bologna
It is held today at 6pm (doors open from 5.45pm) to Modernissimo cinema in Bologna the premiere of the documentary directed by Valerio Baroncini and Marco Santangelo ‘I saw hell’. Those who have already registered are guaranteed a place. Those who didn’t manage to do so still have a chance: this morning from 10am to 2pm it will be possible to register until all available places are filled, always free, on www.ilrestodelcarlino.it/hovistoilfinimondo. So no fear, there is still the possibility to participate. After the screening, discussion with, among others, the General Francesco Figliuolo and the national fire chief Carlo Dall’Oppio.
